


The Times That Things Went Wrong

by DaLaRi



Series: Rough-edge and His Squad and the Long, Long War [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Clones are Vode An, GFY, Gen, Implied Sensory Issues, Liberal Use of Mando'a, POV Second Person, Platonic Acts of Intimacy, Sad, Shitty Formatting, Shitty Healthcare, Thoughts of Self-harm, implied PTSD, intimacy issues, the Grand Army of the Republic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-15
Updated: 2016-11-15
Packaged: 2018-08-31 06:39:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8568103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaLaRi/pseuds/DaLaRi
Summary: sometimes vode wash the leaf litter out of the cracks of a brother's helmet when battles are done and they're back in space. it's simultaneously infinitely more and infinitely less significant than it appears.in other words, Rough is young and doesn't understand just how long wars like these can go on for.





	

**Author's Note:**

> In the wake of the 2016 election, I'm writing to cope. This is a clone oc who sort of evolved as I tried to process what it would mean to be a soldier in the GAR when thinking about it in terms of the scope it should have been. I took my own problems with keeping things with enormous scope in my mind and tried to transfer it here. Rough is my love and the first OC I've ever really connected to.  
> In another vein, I'm really sorry about the mess this work's formatting is, I wrote it from 3-5am after a hellish weekend and PTSD Symptoms: Hell Central and I think that going back to touch it up would be a Bad Idea if it's something i want to post.  
> So here it is, my 5am fic.  
> tw: thoughts of self-harm, intimacy issues, flashbacks, nighmares, non-graphic violence, war setting, dissociative thinking, and reflections on sentience (which i include bc i know it's bad for my dissociation)
> 
> Mando vocabulary:  
> vod- brother  
> vode- brothers  
> beskar'gam- traditional mandalorian armor, deeply entrenched in Mandalorian conceptions of family, heredity, and tradition (i'm not sure if how i used it even references that history, but it's there regardless of whether i did)

  * trying to get leaf litter out of the cracks and lines in your helmet
  * improvised water-blasters. being too tired, having a vod help you. intimacy: a vod taking your helmet in to wash
  * crouching on the floor during takeoff sometimes and grinning, because gods know you love your vode but the artificial gravity is always a little bit off and the _push_ is always that good
  * loving higher-gravity planets for the _push_
  * seeing your face, and your face, and your face and your face, and it’s you, you’re surrounded by a sea of you, warm, living, and grinning, and it feels like you’ll never die
  * scraping the smooth edges of your beskar’gam rough because you needed the purchase, the slick was too much like how it feels to try to grab something smooth in space, like bouncing and falling off, like flying backwards (sometimes you think trust feels like the hand of a vod catching you by the ankle as you fall away. you still keep an eye on that corporal in medical, when you can. he’s _damn_ good at his job, but he’s just a shiny, and he’s _small_ , you nickname him in your head (not a Name, the poor brother is probably long-Named by now, but it’s something affectionate and feels like how the water always seems closer to warm when you wash a brother’s helmet free of litter
  * there’s other things, like how you know your squad and trust them like breathing, like you know the grooves on a pistol and the way your shoulder tries to tense up when you’re taking a long shot with a rifle. you think of how you know them like blaster material under gloves, like the amount of nail you need to leave so you can still get to the catches on your armor in the dark, how you can read them and place yourself around them (never in front of them, a vod can’t fire at an enemy if you’re in front of them, and deep down you’re still _scared_ even if old first-gen survivors of Geonosis say that still makes you a shiny. you look at the set of their mouths and think about what it would take to make your mouth look like that and think, _that’s okay, I’m alright being a shiny._ )
  * you think about your general, when you see him, you see him more than others, you hear; you’ve seen him once in passing, once while standing at attention (back _aching_ from a terrible landing) for briefing, and once in battle, with the hissing and spitting of a lightsaber audible even if you can’t hear the hum. they say that vode who stand close enough to a jedi in battle to hear the hum live longer, if they survive the encounter. maybe that explains why Cody is so old even if they never see him and no one knows where he is a lot of the time and people wonder if he has a vod to wash his helmet.
  * (you think it would be very lonely not to have anyone to wash your helmet, especially with all the scouting attachments and stuff. you don’t think about how no one washes your helmet even though you wash theirs, how you don’t let them and shy away because no, _no_ , there’s still a screaming in your brain that will never stop, but you are soft, so soft even though the war is raging, but slick beskar’gam is nice under your hands when there is warm water, even though you have to scrape your armor raw again when the new phase of armor gets shipped in again, and you try not to think about the way blaster bolts feel against your armor, resistance, like a tunneling, twisting shove, and then nothing. it’s only energy, you try to tell yourself. _it’s not, it’s not,_ that panting, screaming thing inside of you says.)
  * you ruin your gloves by running your fingertips down the rough-ragged platings of your armor. you do not paint anything you can see, but your squad decorates everything you can’t. they love you, even if you can’t see it. they steal the paint colors of other squads, other regiments, other battalions, other _legions,_ but you never see it. they love you so much, _so much_ , but if you knew that you think you’d scream and cry and nothing would ever settle with you again, because you’re a lil broken, a lil ragged, but there’s no time in this war to fix broken things, and you think about this as you repair your pistols and think about what droid plating feels like under your feet as you nurse your twisted ankle and try not to think that it was once almost-alive.
  * droids scream in transmissions when they die. they don’t keep you up, because you are what you are and this ship, and this squad , maybe a bit more, that’s your world and that’s _all_ you know, but you _do_ dream of kamino, and you dream about vaulted ceilings and the sound that shaak-ti’s _lekku_ (you know the word now) make against the back of her robes when she walks, thinks about snickering like the children you were as you hid and she pretended not to notice you, and trying on “she” “her” pronouns with your vode because sounds sound different and sometimes a brother will like the way the sounds catch at the back of the teeth like coming home somewhere and then sometimes they’ll still be a brother, and sometimes they’ll be a _sister_ , which is a thing they find in definitions and schooling, but _damned_ if the ones who came before them weren’t resourceful and they, the brothers, numbered _clones_ know this word now, know it’s foreign and not-theirs but they _have_ it now gods-dammit and they _keep_ it like contraband, and tiny markings vode make in the insides of their training greaves. they _keep_ it, though the droids with their yellow flashing mouths and eyes and _blocks_ and squinting knowingness look for them. and the kaminoans?
  * you never dream of them
  * when you do, you wake up.
  * it’s colder on other planets than it was on kamino, but the ships are warm. it feels not-right to have the warmth and the not-circulating air, so sometimes you sit by a wall or a transparisteel window to feel the cold seep in. you wonder why they waste so much energy on heating, keeping the batallions warm, and a bitter, coughing, laughing part of you (another vod, another vod caught down in a muffled thump and the burning-cold sound of a blaster bolt to the throat, the _sound_ he made, the cough- _groan_ , you carry it with you) says it’s because of the _generals_ , the jedi, but that voice has a voice-not-your-own, rough with tabacc sticks and long, long nights coughing because of it, so you push it aside. it’s easy, when it’s a not-your-voice. no matter how much you loved that vod.
  * it hurts your ears to hear the generals talking. you’ve heard the same register of voice for so long, you instinctively try to fit your mouth around the sounds, but your mouth muscles spasm, and your squadmates catch your eye and try not to laugh, because you’re mid-towards-the-back and it’s just a hologram and one of the vode from another squad has been gradually carving your regiment’s name into a distinctly-not-your-regiment’s-color transport and no one has done anything even a little so your squadmates look you in the eye, and it’s there in the different-ever-so-slight wrinkle-creases of their faces you Know. it feels good. that’s because it ends. however, there’s a loose-and-rough tightness in your chest as you’re deployed.
  * it’s a ground assault, and you break your fist against a droid’s faceplate. you sear your gloves to your skin when you rip the wires out of its neck, but you leave it out of the retelling. it doesn’t sound like something a first-genner would say.
  * you haven’t seen a first-genner in months. Cody is more a myth than a person (wel,, more than he ever was), and there are rumors he is helping their general run the army (there are so _many_ for them, it’s easy to forget sometimes, when the field isn’t blurring their cries into a roar as they advance, sometimes you wish your squadmates hadn’t been so keen on picking up your fascination with vibroblades. bladed combat is _wonderful_ ,and if it would leave you with less digits as your mind falls apart, it would be fine. bacta would seal it (there’s never enough bacta. packings of wounds get thinner every day, and more vode are wincing. their reaction times are slower. pain is bright and loud even when you’re trained to ignore it. you think you see your corporal with more lines around his eyes, and wonder if someone’s been washing his helmet for him. he’s got angry regiment-and-black strips across his helmet and your heart _aches_ for him, but there are curling vines not in his hand curling around the edges of his pauldron, so you think he’s doing alright. it’s okay, even if he’s angry. what medic _isn’t_ angry these days, with vode dying left and right and medical supplies drying up. the brow-furrow-line of an angry fett is an easy way to distinguish a medical vode these days. one squad even painted it across their faces. you try not to sleep and try to keep their faces straight in your mind. _so many brothers are dying. so many brothers are dying._
  * the war gets worse. you see your general again, and want to cry when you hear the hum of the blade low and pure in your throat. you don’t want to live through this, but the sound is a balm, and when you replace a singed thigh piece, you scrape it rough, except for a streak, which you leave smooth. you paint it the same crystal-clear blue as the blade, as the sound. you go to it often. nothing gets better, but you live through it.
  * your squad is still alive, but there’s a tension. _when’s it going to break, when’s it going to end_. and there’s more tension than ever now you get better, and you are promoted, your fear makes you better soldiers, but some vode look with knowing eyes. they know you are a pressure mine. some squads don’t die. some blow themselves apart.
  * it happens in a battle, because _of course it does_. One of your brothers snaps an order, and the other breaks. they pick the wrong droid in someone else’s line, and then there’s a _kriffing clanker_ sending a blot into the squadmate at your side. you hear the muffled gasp, the collapse, and you trip over them, and fall. your one-two one-two of fire, stops, and in the time it takes you to faceplant in your vod’s armor. two more of your squadmates are on the ground. One of your vode pulls you back by your backplate, grief keening loud in the half-inch lower position of the barrel, in the millimeter’s change in hand positioning. they make it through it, the three remaining, tight as terrified, wholy trusting people can be. the vod who made the mistake is shaking in all the ways you can during a battle, their comm is not transmitting, they’re shooting for fastest incapacitation rather than for permanent downing, and they’re _stepping in front of vode._ they take a shot that would have missed youlow in the abdomen, and then there’s a retreat being sounded and _you have to leave them there_ and you want to scream but you can’t but _everyone else has lost a squadmate shut the kriffing hells up Rough except for shinies_ and you try to make your mouth do the thing that first-genner did when you knew him, and it’s _easy_ because that’s that indesdcribable feeling that you’re feeling, there in that pulled muscle taught at the orner of your mouth. it makes you _understand_ , so you make it a part of you. older, more “experienced” vodelaugh when they see it on you (only lost squadmates, says one who lost their _company_ and was folded into theirs, with his eyes. it’s not accusatory, but it’s close enough, but you can’t stop now)
  * you don’t see your medic with the curling vines again. you don’t know it, but he survives. starts a family somewhere after being left behind half-dead. left-behind clones are becoming more and more common as medical supplies run out. you never check on your squadmates. you don’t want to know (can’t, can’t, can’t, can’t, _can’t_ , and the screaming thing that never stopped is _SCREAMING)_
  * you sleep too much now, and drink too much caf. you don’t let yourself, even though you have your squadmates’ vibroblades now, you don’t use them. you don’t recycle a single thing they painted, report them as missing or incinerated, and keep them. what you couldn’t bear to loom at before now is endlessly captivating. you look at the detail, you look at what you chose, and feel chilled to the core. they _knew_
  * you rough up the blue streak on your leg, and cover it with clumsy, large flowers like they would have wanted. your remaining squadmates bawl when they see it because you bring it to them off-hours and not on the battlefield and the _cry_ , and you reach for them and they just _crush_ you to them, and it’s two people, _too close but never enough never enough **why not three more**_ and you clutch them tighter even as the screaming thing in your chest doesn’t let go, nor does the jangling thing. it doesn’t let up, but you stay the night with the two of them, with their two cot pads pulled out and set next to each other on the floor. you barely fit and it is too warm and uncomfortable, but they hung the thigh piece from a helmet peg on the wall and it is _so much_ and not- not- _never_
  * you’ll tend towards them like a weak magnetic force now, and they’ll welcome you in and you’ll get worse. you’ve always had intimacy issues (if you’d know them) and you pull too hard into the orbit and gradual consumption of people, emotions, and thoughts. your vode protected you from vibroblades, but oh how you protected yourself from yourself. that is all past, though, dashed to bits. you wear color where you can see it now, and it catches your eye and reminds you of nicknames you once had from the mouths of vode, and you find strength in that, you find courage. you get better. you get bitter. you get reckless. you make tactical assaults. you lead. your general is on rattatak. you come face to face with Cody, and he his just a man, just a vod, and the first-genners are so _old_ and you wonder, catching a glimpse of his helmet, if he has anyone to wash it for him. you are past that ritual wuth your squad, but the memory of the repeated thought soothes you. you snap a salute and try not to let the muscles in the corner of your mouth tighten at the grief and the anger and _years_ and hard-fireglass- _rage_ behind his eyes. _how much have you seen, brother? how much have you seen?_ you want to ask, but first-genners have always been More, and in the space of a second he has, he wastes it. maybe it would have been different. but Cody’s boots make a heavy sound as they hit against the floor. the door is squeaky- it’s the track, it’s the track. you think to go and fix it, but your back reminds you and you don’t. you go back to your quarters, where it’s three cot pads now.
  * the war continues.



**Author's Note:**

> i'm on tumblr as autisticthatthouknowestthine if you want to come drop in n say hi, i write a shitton of meta about the clone wars in the tags of the things that i post.  
> also, i apologize for any inaccuracies that jarred you while reading this, and please feel free to drop by and tell me if there's anything that really bugs you. most of the time my rationale will be "i don't know" but if i ever do rewrite/edit this, i will be happy to take your comments into account.  
> thank you all so much for reading, and stay safe. you all matter to me.


End file.
